by Leigh Stein
After the nativity was in place, I scattered handfuls of gelt, foil-wrapped chocolate coins, across the drink buffet like treasure in the tombs of kings.
If I’d had it my way, I would have put up the last of the lights, filled the punch bowl, and left. But I promised I’d stay until at least ten o’clock. My parents wanted the daughter in the photographs, the one who had won all the trophies displayed on the piano next to the manger, there to say hello to any middle-aged woman in a sparkly sweater set who had ever held me as a baby. Laugh at her husband’s bad jokes. Make sure everyone tried the brie before it decomposed.
Before Amy arrived I’d been making repeated trips to the buffet, and walking from room to room with a wineglass in one hand, a tray of hors d’oeuvres in the other. I was friendly enough, but the crab cakes were my excuse to keep moving. I wish I could hear more about your son’s mission trip, but I have to make sure everyone gets a chance to try one of these delicious crab cakes!
Every time I glimpsed Amy, she was hurrying to either finish or begin a glass of white wine, like a teenager who knows the cops may come at any second, and wants to drink as much as possible before she has to hop a fence. For a while she was engaged in an animated conversation with my mom’s Mary Kay representative. Amy would say something understated, take a sip, and then the woman would laugh hysterically as she checked around her to see if anyone else had heard. Amy was the only woman in the house in a strapless dress. She didn’t stand too near anyone, didn’t scan the room for something to hold on to; she was like an artificial plant, something that needs nothing.
We ran into each other at the buffet. “And here’s the trophy winner,” she said, taking my arm with her cool hand. I passed her a glass of wine, and told her my parents had bought all the trophies at a garage sale to cover up for the years I spent gangbangin’ in the hood.
“Wanna see my tats?”
Amy laughed and let go of my arm. “I hope my own daughters are so lucky,” she said. “Now let’s find somewhere to sit; parties make me nervous.”
“Welcome to my life,” I said.
“Did you help set all this up?”
I nodded. Once I was seated, I could appreciate how everything in the room sparkled and glowed like a movie set. The other guests might as well have all been saying rutabaga rutabaga, like background extras.
“You know what’s funny? Before I met Nate,” Amy said, “a long time ago, when I was still in Arizona, I was living with my boyfriend. We were both going to school. My parents invited us for the holidays, but it was the first time I’d ever lived with a man—a boy?”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty? Twenty-one? So a boy. The first time I’d ever lived with a boy, and I wanted to stay with him and make my own Thanksgiving dinner, prove that I was this domesticated woman. I was taking all these gender studies classes in addition to studio art, but he was Mormon and wanted this wifey girlfriend. I would be this radical feminist in the mornings and then come home and do all of Sam’s laundry—”
“He was Mormon?”
“We were both Mormon, but kind of lapsed.” I tried not to stare at her like she was an alien, but that’s what she was now. An alien. We were aliens from different planets. On my planet, we covered our trees with popcorn strings.
“I guess he was less lapsed than I was,” she said. “I mean, we shouldn’t have been living together if we were really … He never told his parents.” Amy took a long sip of wine. When she lifted her chin, I could see the faint pockets of acne scars along her jaw and across her cheeks, under her makeup.
“Why did I start telling you about this?”
“You said, ‘You know what’s funny?’ ”
“Oh, the turkey,” she said. “We bought a turkey the night before Thanskgiving. I wanted to just buy breasts, and cook those, but Sam was adamant that we get an entire turkey. I didn’t know you had to defrost it for twenty-four hours. It was half frozen when I tried cooking it. I couldn’t find the giblets to remove, so they were just cooked inside. It was basically inedible. At one point I think I cried. We had mashed potatoes for dinner, and I don’t think our relationship ever really recovered from it.” She smiled, but I wasn’t sure which part of the story she was smiling at. “But this,” she said, “this party, this is so beautiful.”
We both watched an older couple as they shared the same glass of eggnog across the room. Then Amy threw back her head and finished her wine in a swallow. Her earrings caught the light like kaleidoscopes. “We have a babysitter tonight,” she told me, and held up her empty glass. Victorious.
My mom was nearby, but she hadn’t noticed I was no longer catering crab cakes because she was busy showing off her refurbished accordion. “So far I can play ‘Hey Jude,’ ” I heard her say, “but my dream is to start a zydeco band.”
“A what?”
“A zydeco band.”
Her friend nodded and took a sip of wine. My mom assumed that all women, everywhere, listened to CDs of Clifton Chenier, the king of Louisiana French-Cajun folk music, while running errands in their minivans, and it was therefore unnecessary for her to define the term.
Amy and I looked up when the doorbell rang, but my dad was there to show the newcomers where to put their wet boots, and to thank them for their wine bottles, wreathed with bows. “Jeanine?” he called to my mom.
“You could be the violinist,” my mom was saying to her nodding friend. “We need a violinist and Esther says she won’t.”
“Jeanine, I only have two hands.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m coming. Excuse me for just a minute.” She tucked her accordion back into its red upholstered bed as carefully as if it were a child and locked the case. Left with nothing to do and no one to talk to, her friend turned around to look out into the room, probably hoping to catch the eye of someone she knew. I recognized her. She taught history and language arts at the middle school where my mom taught science and math. Mrs. McGowan.
Someone began to play a slow, haunting “O Tannenbaum” on the piano in the next room. Amy closed her eyes. “Uh oh, that sounds like my husband,” she said, feigning embarrassment like he was actually playing a toy piano, or a kazoo. “We don’t have a piano at home.”
“Do you want to go watch?”
“I don’t know if I can stand up right now,” she said.
I took a cocktail shrimp off someone else’s hors d’oeuvre plate forgotten on the windowsill and that’s when Amy’s eyes went wide, and she noticed my name tags.
Before the party, I had helped my mom print sheets of them on blank address labels. Half said, “I’m Jewish. Ask me about Hanukkah.” The other half said, “I’m not Jewish. Tell me about Hanukkah.”
“I don’t want to discriminate against our guests,” my dad said when he saw what we had done.
“Paul,” my mom teased, “your anti-Semitism is showing.”
“It’s not.”
“It is. This isn’t a requirement. This isn’t a yellow star.”
He wouldn’t wear one, and said we couldn’t actually offer them to guests; we were only allowed to leave them on a small table near the bathroom where the light wasn’t very good.
I thought it would be clever to wear both, so I did.
We weren’t religious Jews. We went to synagogue twice a year in the fall, for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement; we proved our reverence by fasting until sundown and turning off the radio in the car on the way to temple. It was usually windy and raining. My dad would borrow a yarmulke, I would suffer from caffeine withdrawal and forget the words to prayers, we would ask for forgiveness and it would be given to us, and then we would go out for steak at the first sight of the sun slipping below the horizon.
“I guess you didn’t see them, on the table by the bathroom.”
“Nope.”
“I don’t completely remember the story and I thought it would be funny if someone asked me and I made it up,” I said.
“
I was taught to believe an angel revealed golden plates to Joseph Smith, which he translated deep in the woods so no one else would see them. You could tell me anything and I’d believe it.”
“Well,” I said, and checked to see if anyone was around to hear before continuing, “I guess the Jews were being persecuted and slaughtered as usual, and so they had to fight against the bad guys to get the Temple of Jerusalem back.” I wondered why no one had ever made a Claymation movie of this. Or maybe they had, but I’d never seen it. I would probably know the story better if I had.
Amy leaned in. “Who were the bad guys? Christians?”
“Mormons, probably. Mormons or Internet predators.”
Amy laughed and nodded. “Or both.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But anyway, they won the temple back, but when they got inside they saw that they only had enough oil to light the lamp for one night even though it’s supposed to always be lit. And they were all like, What are we gonna do, this sucks so hard.”
“Oh, I think I remember this now,” Amy said.
“But the oil ended up lasting for eight nights until new oil could be found or made or blessed or whatever, a Hanukkah miracle. And so, each night we light another candle and we place the menorah in the window of our home to testify to the miracle, to let everyone know that even though we may have a Christmas tree in our living room, we’re still Jews. Because we believe in walking across the desert for forty years, we believe in parting seas, we believe in the mysterious love of a God who would allow horrible atrocities to befall us again and again.”
“Like the Holocaust,” she said, with the inebriate’s talent for the obvious.
“Like the Holocaust,” I said.
“So you celebrate Christmas? The tree isn’t just for the party?”
“Right.” I was only slightly less drunk than she was, and tried to appear otherwise, as I straightened my posture and focused my eyes. I couldn’t remember all of what I had just said; I wouldn’t have been able to repeat my butchered Hanukkah story for any other listener.
Amy had wide, bright eyes like speckled bird eggs that made you feel lucky to have her undivided attention, but sometimes they left me, and roamed the room, in an anxious search for some unknowable thing, like she’d forgotten what it was she couldn’t remember, and after a minute I could see her make the conscious effort to return.
It was strange, to feel left behind without the other person moving an inch.
• • •
Before I left the party, I snuck in and stood at the back of the crowd singing “Silent Night” in four-part harmony in the dining room, while Nate played the piano. He had broad swimmer’s shoulders and a strong back. He was attractive, just as Amy was attractive, in a way that was especially apparent at a party with people fifteen, twenty years their senior. As he played piano, he sometimes hesitated, trying to find a chord, and leaned in so close to the sheet music that his nose touched the page, but no one cared how well he played as long as the melody continued uninterrupted, something to sing to, an anchor.
After the song ended he stood and took a little bow. Someone handed him a drink—something caramel-colored over ice. Where had that come from? Was that something from our cabinets? “Play ‘Auld Lang Syne’!” a woman in the crowd yelled out.
“It’s too early for that! Play ‘White Christmas.’ ”
“I think I’ve tortured everyone enough for now,” Nate said, and nervously tugged at one of his ears. Up close and from the lines around his eyes I could see he was older than I thought, older than Amy. After he stopped playing, the crowd reluctantly dispersed.
“You play better than I do, and I’m the one they bought the piano for.”
“I’ve had more years to practice,” he said, and took a sip from his glass. It was one of our Heroes of the To rah glasses—I had found them in the cabinet above the refrigerator where we kept the party napkins. Nate’s glass had Shlomo HaMelech, otherwise known as King Solomon.
Amy had found her sea legs and joined us; she stood next to Nate, close but not touching. “Esther and I are best friends now, did she tell you?”
“Small world,” Nate said, not paying attention. He was looking at me, but he put his hand on the small of Amy’s back and I thought it was strange that she didn’t lean in; she continued to stand straight and apart from him.
“We should probably get going soon,” Amy said. She turned to look at him.
“I have to go, too,” I said. “I promised some friends I’d meet them.”
“Well, it was very nice to meet you finally,” Nate said. “We’ll have to get you to play next time.”
“Sure, next time,” I said. “We’ll get out the book of duets.”
And then I left.
TILLY LOSCH
It was the only house on the block with sunflowers in the yard. Happy people live here, the sunflowers said. They lined the driveway and bloomed in the garden near the front porch, topping stalks of purple iris and the heads of tiger lilies, bowed in prayer. The sight of the garden made up for the lawn, which was a patchwork of dry grass and white clover. I’m depressed and I don’t care, the lawn said. The end is near.
I walked up the flagstone path to the porch and knocked on the door frame. A half dozen wind chimes pealed as a breeze blew in through the screened walls.
Was I hungover? I was. Did one of my fingers hurt when I moved it? It did. Had Pickle and Jack and I hopped a fence the night before? I couldn’t remember, but the fact that I wondered if we had made me think the answer was yes.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice called from inside.
“Hello?” I said.
“Esther?” she said. “Come in, you don’t have to knock.”
The front door opened into a small foyer. There was a stairway straight ahead and to my right Amy and May were sitting cross-legged on a rug in the living room, piecing together a puzzle of what looked like a dragon. Amy stood when I came in and shook my hand.
“Thanks for coming over,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m shaking your hand.”
“That’s okay.” We both smiled. We smiled like new friends with no common language. Her hair was the same dishwater blond as I remembered from the party, but the red-rimmed glasses were new, at least to me. She was wearing a shirt with a screenprint of a woman with antlers on her head. Amy’s arms were long and thin. She was barefoot.
“Should I take off my shoes?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter, does it, May?” she said. “Can you say hi to Esther?”
Since my entrance, May had been watching us suspiciously from the middle of the room, holding a small chenille throw blanket in the air like a toreador’s cape. When I waved, she seemed surprised that I could see her, and ran to the couch. Once on top, she pulled the blanket over her head like a veil and made herself a ghost.
Amy’s daughter was her exact replica in miniature, and all I could think was how frightened that would make me, to see myself as a child, running around, hiding under blankets.
The blanket only covered May’s head and shoulders. She folded her hands in her lap and didn’t move.
Amy gave me a sly look. She was going all out. “Did you see where May went?” she whispered.
I knew a right answer would be my initiation into their world of animal crackers and tiny barrettes, Dr. Seuss and tag.
“She moved so fast I lost track,” I whispered back.
“Olly olly oxen free,” Amy called. “Come out come out wherever you are.” She went to the couch and began to lift all the pillows and cushions around May and pile them on top of her body. “She has to be in here somewhere,” she said. “Tell me if you see her before I do. I’ll check inside the pull-out bed.”
May giggled at the bottom of the heap.
“Did you hear that?”
Amy stopped to listen with one hand cupped around an ear.
“Hear what?” I said. “That little mouse?”
“Was it a mouse?”
“Is
there a mouse in the house?”
“It could be a louse,” Amy said, frowning. “It could be a louse of a grouse,” she said, and then pounced on her daughter, tickling her until she screamed for mercy and emerged from the upholstery, breathless and flushed.
Amy pushed her glasses up. She, too, was out of breath. “Say hi to Esther, Mayflower. You two are going to have a lot of fun together, I think.”
“I’m not a mouse,” May said. “I’m a baby dinosaur.”
She made a strangled, squeaky noise like that little girl dinosaur from The Land Before Time, and jumped from the couch onto Amy’s back. Amy carried her around the room. I briefly wondered if my mom had the story wrong. Maybe one of my dad’s other coworker’s wives had lost her baby, but it couldn’t have been Amy. She didn’t seem depressed. The two of them had the frantic energy of a flea circus. I wondered if every day was like this one—if they woke up and ate Cheerios with bananas and put together puzzles of mythical beasts and dressed up in costumes and played hide-and-go-seek until someone made them turn the lights out and go to bed, like how I imagined the lives of identical twins to be. I could picture them reading together under the covers with a flashlight. Unless, of course, once May was asleep Amy locked herself in the bathroom to drink an entire bottle of Chardonnay and cry.
“I’m going to go outside for a minute,” Amy said. “Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“No,” May said.
“Just for a second, pigeon. To s-m-o-k-e,” she whispered to me. Amy put May down to go look for something in the drawers of the table in the foyer.
“I know how to read,” May said.
“You do?”
She took my hand and made me sit down on the demolished couch. Then she crawled under the coffee table to look for something. I heard the back door click shut when Amy left.
It was more of a library than a living room. A living library. A library you could live in. There was no TV or stereo. The walls were covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves made of dark wood. Whatever books were too oversized to fit were piled on the floor, or on the ledge of the rolltop desk in the corner, beneath the window that overlooked the porch and front garden. The batik window shades were raised, and the sunlight illuminated all the slow-moving particles in the air, making it visible like a screen.